


The Lichtenberg Figure

by MirandaTam



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen, Healing Magic, Heart Attacks, Heart Disease, Tris at Lightsbridge, the College Experience, tris is a nerd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:22:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24181285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirandaTam/pseuds/MirandaTam
Summary: Despite it all, Tris is the only one of the four who ever learns how to heal.
Comments: 22
Kudos: 161





	The Lichtenberg Figure

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thousand thanks to the wonderful [Sanvi](https://windywords123.tumblr.com/) for beta'ing this, for helping with Cihan's introduction, for giving me fantastic comments, and for generally being a wonderful human being.

Despite it all, Tris is the only one of the four who ever learns how to heal.

Briar tries, time after time, starting in Urda’s House during the blue pox plague; he knows the veins and arteries of the body and tries to let the roots of his power flow into them, strengthen them, but it never works. He can't run his power through other people, not the way healers can. No matter how hard he tries, he can't burn out disease, can't mend broken bones, can't relieve pain (at least, not without his medicines). Briar tells himself that other people's veins are like a web of roots, that his power is like sunlight flowing into a leaf – but his power knows better. He's never been particularly good at lying to himself. That doesn't mean that he ever stops trying.

Daja tries only twice. First, alone in the house watching over Rosethorn, as her teacher coughs and wheezes and her fever rises. Daja makes herself a bellows and goes to blow into Rosethorn’s damaged lungs, to try and clear out the fluid. Rosethorn catches her by the wrist and pushes her away. “It won't work,” she rasps. “Do you think you have enough control to not pop my lungs like a balloon? No? Then don’t you dare touch your lips to mine. Don’t risk catching what I’ve got.” Daja pulls her mask back up and has nightmares, that night, and for the week that follows.

The second time is also the second time she meets Polyam. The trader, no longer decked in her bright protective yellow, is full of praises for the leg that Daja had made. But _Gilav_ Chandrisa pulls her aside and asks if there's anything she can do for Polyam's aching arm. She can make no promises except to try. With Polyam's grudging permission, Daja brings warmth to her scarred arm. She tries to gently melt the damaged nerves like wires, smooth over the rough edges. “The heat is nice, soothing,” Polyam says, but the pain is back the next day. Daja can’t do anything more for Polyam than she’d achieve by sitting near a warm hearth.

Sandry, of the four, knows her power best, every little trailing thread and loose fiber of it. She weaves bandages, embroiders signs for health and wellness, lends healers her strength – but she knows that healing is not for her.

Tris doesn’t dare try healing, of course, of course, of course. Not with a real person. She tries with the healers’ models, where they train their apprentices in the forms power flows in the body, but she can’t get any of her magic to flow outside her hands. Lightning she sprouts aplenty, and wind, and heat, but the magic itself is what healers use – magic to give strength to let the body heal itself – and Tris can’t convince her power to flow like that.

Trisana Chandler leaves Summersea, and Trisira Kisubo enters Lightsbridge. (Daja and Briar had had a mock fight, over whose surname she’d use to apply; and as much as she’d liked Briar’s new blend of headache tea, Daja’s wind-catching spectacles had won that particular contest.) It had been Niko who’d suggested _Trisira_ , and Glaki who’d insisted upon it, so she could be Glaki Irakory and acknowledge both her mothers. Tris hadn’t even tried to hide how much that made her cry.

Tris enters Lightsbridge, and instantly falls in love with it. Oh, there are things to hate, of course; students interested in the social games more than their studies, people sneering down at her for her unknown name, for her lack of connections. But there is a library – and there are other students who also love the library, students here on scholarship or who have worked hard to get in, who truly love learning. There are professors who challenge her the way she hasn’t been challenged in years, who listen to her arguments and say _and? Elaborate, Miss Kisubo_ , and Tris practically blossoms under their teaching. 

Of course, there are also general education requirements, even for mage-students at the University. Tris takes a class on historical Anderran literature (and is almost drawn into changing her major), a class on calculus (and is almost drawn into changing her major), a class on ancient Emelanese runes (and is… you get the point).

Tris can choose from the advanced electives, since she’s submitted her Winding Circle credentials (with Honored Moonstream’s recommendation, and the note about her concealed identity to satisfy the administration), and those credentials include the basic studies the four had done when learning about how bodies worked. For her biomancy elective, then, she chooses a class on the circulatory system – on the flow of blood throughout the body, bringing air from the lungs to the extremities and to the brain. And, of course, they discuss the heart. Not the metaphysical heart, the center for emotions, but the _physical_ heart, the muscle that pumps blood throughout the body, always working, never ceasing.

“What keeps the heart going,” Master Yarrowsteam explains, “is energy. Yes, power, magic, all of that – but all the signals that the body sends, from your eyes to your brain, throughout your brain, from your spine to your muscles, to the heart, all of that is determined by small impulses of energy. One could think of them as tiny lightnings.” 

Tris sits up straight – no, she’d already been sitting up straight, but if she hadn’t, she would be now. 

“It’s one of the reasons getting struck by lightning is so dangerous," the professor continues. "The lightning interrupts the body’s own signals, overwhelming them, confusing them."

One of the other students, a boy Tris doesn't recognize, raises his hand. "But… if the body contains small lightnings already, shouldn't more lightning be beneficial, not harmful?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Tris scoffs. "Think of an irrigation system, of ditches bringing water to plants. If the land floods, the ditches can get clogged, or wiped away completely."

Master Yarrowstream sighs, loudly and pointedly. "Indeed, Miss Kisubo, but remember in the future to _raise your hand_ before speaking."

Tris flushes red and sinks further down into her seat. But she forgets her embarrassment almost immediately, as Master Yarrowstream continues:

"It has been theorized that for some arrhythmias, a carefully-applied stroke of power – magic, of course, in our case, as lightning isn’t a controllable option – could in a way re-focus the heart muscles, control their mis-alignment. But that’s for the healers to worry about. Now, for the heart to continue beating, there must be no obstructions in the veins surrounding it…”

Tris can barely sleep that night. A carefully-applied stroke of power… of _lightning_ … could she re-start a faltering heart?

Why? she thinks, tossing and turning in bed. What’s the point, when there are certainly healers available who can do the same? Still. Tris resolves to think about it more, to meditate on it, to write to Niko and ask what he thinks.

But then next semester, the University offers a class on tectonic drift over the millenia and Tris (almost) forgets all about the workings of the heart.

The class on tectonic drift is also where Tris meets and befriends Cihan Bardak. Cihan is short, dark-haired and brown-skinned, with a bright smile and an insatiable thirst for mathematics.

It starts as a competition – they tie for the highest grade on their first essay, and so of course Tris has to get a better grade on the second. Cihan takes the third assignment of the year, and when the fourth essay is assigned, Tris catches Cihan's sleeve on the way out the door. "Good job on that last essay, but my thesis this time is going to blow you away," she says, smiling. 

Cihan smirks back, and then it's on.

After that class ends, they meet up fairly regularly, as their schedules allow; Cihan is an early riser, and loads their schedule heavily with morning classes, whereas Tris prefers to take her time in the morning, so they only manage to overlap once every couple of weeks. A few times, Cihan brings their sister around, and Tris becomes fast friends with Ihsan as well.

Ihsan isn’t attending the university, though – she talks about how much she misses her home back in Sotat, where she was trying to get an apprenticeship to a potter. After a few meetings at a small bakery just outside the university gates, she explains.

“I’m here for the healers,” she says, brushing at the pastry crumbs that have fallen on her lap, not quite meeting Tris’s eyes. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

Tris nods and moves on; if it’s not her business, it’s not her business. But Cihan and Ihsan are close – twins, as Tris learns – and over time, meeting Ihsan again and again, she can’t help but notice the way she tires so easily, how her breath sometimes comes short and faint, how sometimes she sways when she stands up.

Tris catches her arm, once, to steady Ihsan as she looks almost ready to fall over, and frowns. Under her fingertips, in the magic that Tris has been avoiding using for nearly three years now, something is fluttering in a way it shouldn’t be. But the feeling goes away, and Ihsan thanks Tris for steadying her.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Tris says later that day, “But haven’t the healers been able to help?”

Cihan scowls as Ihsan just shrugs.

“They’re still attempting to find the underlying cause, they said,” Ihsan says. “It’s tricky, because… well. I don’t feel like this all the time, after all. If I don’t have my symptoms where the healers can notice, there’s… not much they can do.”

Afterwards, Cihan pulls Tris aside. “She keeps getting healers who don’t believe her,” they say. “She was sick when we were little, and never really recovered. I’ve done some research, and it sounds to me like a problem with her heart, but the healers that she’s talked to say that they can’t sense anything wrong, and anyways she’s too young for a weak heart.”

Tris can feel her expression go flat and stormy. “I see. I may have some people I can write to.”

She writes to Rosethorn first. Rosethorn’s dealt with Lightsbridge before, after all. Tris desperately wishes she could justify the four-day trip south to get in range of her siblings again, but can’t; it’s the time of the semester when classes are getting harder and harder, and it should only take a week for Rosethorn to get her letter. _What could happen in that short a time?_ She asks herself. Really, she should know better.

They’re in the marketplace – it’s watersday, with no classes, so the market is at its busiest, most crowded, with barely room to breathe. Cihan notices Ihsan tiring, attuned as they are to their sister’s health, and so the trio make their way to the edge of the market.

It’s not clear what happens, what triggers it, if indeed there is any one thing; as Tris finds out later, sometimes there is, and sometimes the body has just reached its limit.

Something is wrong, Tris can feel it when Ihsan brushes up against her shoulder. Cihan seems to know it, too, and then so do the people around them when Ihsan stumbles, goes to her knees, gasping.

“Something–" she says, out of breath, her voice faint, hard to hear under the roar of the market around them. “I don’t–“

“Don’t waste your breath,” Tris snaps, and with Cihan’s help pulls her into an alcove – quieter, very slightly. People are starting to gather, market-goers and stall-keepers. Tris turns her stormy glare on them. “Fetch a healer,” she orders. “ _Now_!”

She turns back to Ihsan. Cihan has her sitting on the ground, leaning against a wall, and is talking to her quietly, urgently. Ihsan’s dark skin is grey-tinged, her eyes unfocused. Her breathing – Tris can tell something is wrong with it, the way she’s gasping for air. But something tells her that the gasping, the lack of air, is a symptom, not the source of the issue. A small piece of her attention is on her winds, following the person from the crowd who’d run, shouting for a healer – but she forgets that, as Ihsan’s eyes flutter close and she slumps, unconscious, against the wall.

Tris kneels down next to Ihsan and takes her wrist, feeling for a pulse. She can’t find one. Cihan is crying.

“Lay her down,” Tris orders. “I can try something.”

All four of them had learned, under Rosethorn and Lark and Dedicate Vetiver, how to deal with a heart attack – how to try to deal with a heart attack. Tris pushes on Ihsan’s chest, breathes into her lungs, keeps pushing.

Meditation breathing is hard to do, when trying to breathe for another person. Tris thinks over her options, mentally says _to pijule fakol with all of it_ , and draws one of her winds down into Ihsan’s chest, gently, gently bringing air into her lungs. Tris keeps pumping on her chest, trying to restart her heart, but she can feel it under her fingertips, faint and quivering with misaligned energy.

Tris closes her eyes and breathes deeply, as she keeps up the chest compressions, as she keeps carefully drawing bits of wind into Ihsan’s lungs. She closes everything else out, everything but the body beneath her hands.

There is lightning in the body, Tris remembers; tiny, tiny, _tiny_ fragments of it, less than what Briar had once called a sneeze-worth.

She takes her magic and, without hesitation – hesitation means another moment without Ihsan’s blood flowing through her body – without hesitation sends a spark through Ihsan’s chest.

Tris calls on the piece of Sandry’s magic in her to do it; thinks of it as carding the energy in the heart, drawing it back into alignment. She wills it to be so – she is Trisana Chandler, and she knows her lightning, knows precisely the amount to use.

Another set of chest compressions. A breath of wind threaded into Ihsan’s lungs.

Her heart beats once. Twice.

Tris can feel the tiny fibers of energy fraying. Another spark, another drawing in, combing through it and reminding it to align.

Ihsan coughs.

Her heart beats beneath Tris’s hands, quietly, steadily.

Ihsan… breathes.

Tris breathes, too – she hasn’t stopped breathing, the habit of meditation so deeply ingrained, but she closes her eyes and falls back to sit on her heels, finally letting the terror she’d been feeling flow through her veins.

Cihan is still crying, holding their sister’s hand and brushing their fingers through her hair, and Tris knows that there will be consequences for using her ambient magic in front of so many people, but there will be time to worry about that later. For now Ihsan’s heart has been restarted, and – Tris can hear them on the wind – there are healers on the way, bearing a stretcher to take her to Lightsbridge’s hospital. Ihsan is alive, and that’s what matters.

The healers come, and Tris and Cihan follow them closely as they carry Ihsan through the market to the hospital. One of the healers questions them closely, asking Cihan about their sister’s medical history and Tris about the details of what had happened.

"I’ve been trained in resuscitation," Tris says. "I used my magic to assist, and – experimentally, because she was dying – to… well, restart her heart."

The healer frowns, but nods, and tells Tris that they’ll want more details once they reach the hospital.

That time comes sooner than Tris would have liked it, but she reminds herself that it’s inevitable. Ihsan is sleeping in a hospital bed, and Cihan is dozing on the chair by her bed, passed out from the exhaustion and stress and relief.

Tris paces, quietly so as not to disturb either of her friends, until one of the healers draws her into an office and asks her to explain.

Tris does so carefully – she’s had time to think about what to say, after all. She won’t be able to keep her identity secret, not from the healers who will surely be able to sense the remnants of weather magic in Ihsan’s body. But if she convinces them that it won’t do any harm for her to stay Trisira Kisubo, for just the next year until she graduates…

"I won’t publicize your identity, no, not so long as the University deans already know about it," the head healer says with a slight frown. "It’s not our business. Except…"

Tris is too dignified to bite her lip. "Except what?"

The healer lays her pen down and looks at Tris, her head tilted in interest. "Would you be interested in spending more time here in the hospital? I understand you intend to get your general magic license, but we are an _experimental_ hospital here, and you have some fascinating talents that could be put to use, maybe even taught to more standard mages. We can provide class credit, of course, or perhaps an internship…"

Once Tris recovers from the shock, she can’t say yes fast enough.

She tells Ihsan and Cihan, as soon as Ihsan is mostly recovered, is sitting up and alert and wanting to know what had happened. The healers are finally ( _"fucking finally"_ , Cihan says) paying attention to Ihsan's heart, sending their magic through it to find out what's been going wrong. They call it _cardiomyopathy_ , and with Ihsan's permission, the head healer sends scorching letters to the healers who'd examined Ihsan before and ignored what she says are _"obvious symptoms."_

"The healers say that you saved my life," Ihsan says. "Of course I forgive you for giving us a false name. None of the person beneath the name was false, was she?"

"Except for the magic, and the history, and the stories," Cihan mutters sharply. "I've heard _stories_ about you!"

Cihan forgives her, of course. But they're like Tris, prickly all over; it's why they get along so well. So Tris lets them prickle and be sharp, all the while holding their sister's hand tight.

Ihsan apprentices to a potter right there in Lightsbridge, in the city surrounding the University. Cihan gets to meet Tris's siblings, when they go down to visit Summersea for the holidays; it ends well, once they get over their awe, although Tris does wish they'd stop flirting with Briar. (They do stop, in the future – but only because Ihsan starts flirting with Daja, and Briar and Cihan are both too distracted to remember to make fun of Tris by flirting in front of her.)

The next year, Trisira Kisubo graduates with honors from the University at Lightsbridge, earning her a license in general magic.

Two years later, accompanied by her sister Daja, Trisana Chandler goes back to Lightsbridge, and begins studying towards earning her Mastery in the field of healing.


End file.
